attack
dr. dolittle | May 16, 2014Just in case you have not seen this viral YouTube video of the family cat saving a boy from a vicious dog attack, I have embedded it below. I think this kitty deserves a nice fresh fish for dinner...every day.
An article was posted today in NBCNews featuring the heroics of other house cats.
Here is one of my favorites:
Image of a clawless house cat named Jack that chased a bear up a tree. Image from NBC News: http://www.today.com/pets/good-kitty-these-6-hero-cats-saved-humans-the…
These brave felines must really believe they have 9 lives!!
You can check out the rest of these heroic…
rallain | August 28, 2010Ghostbusters is old enough that I don't mind giving away some spoilers. If you haven't seen it, I doubt you are going to.
In the movie, the Ghostbusters capture some ghosts. They keep these ghosts in some "containment grid" device. Someone from the city doesn't like this and comes to turn it off. After much searching, I found the clip.
I am going to talk about Louisiana education and tenure, but first I will look the players in the above scene. What were they thinking? Here is my guess.
Walter Peck: These Ghostbusters are a bunch of frauds. They are just stealing money from people…
rallain | August 1, 2010Chasing Mummies is kind of like a cross between the reality showness of Deadliest Catch and History's Mysteries. I like these kind of shows. My kids like these shows. It's win-win.
The basic idea of this show is to follow this dude, Zahi Hawass- he is like in charge of all the Egyptian museums. Here is a youtube clip that gives a pretty good overview.
However, I do have a beef - well maybe it is just a small quibble. At the beginning of one show, Zahi is all pumped up about some new discovery. They found some tombs near the great pyramids that seem to be the tombs of workers that did…
rallain | July 11, 2010My car had a flat tire. When you get a flat tire, you might as well make something useful of it - right? As I was jacking the car up, I had a great idea. Use this for one of my "Spoof Science" videos. The only problem is that this takes a ton of work to put together a short video. So, I am just going to talk about what I could have done.
Here is a quick clip of my 4 year old lifting the car.
So, he lifted the car - it maybe be difficult to tell, but he did. HE LIFTED THE CAR! Ok, I know, he only lifted part of the car. If I were to use this in a real Spoof Science video, I would have…
rallain | July 9, 2010In regards to the recent PepsiCo blog situation (you know the one I mean), I wasn't going to say much. First, because Chad did a good job at expressing my views (without me even telling him ). Second, I am just happy to be at ScienceBlogs - I had been kicked off two servers and had to hitch a ride on a friend's server (thanks Bill) before arriving here.
Some other bloggers, were a little more put out. Now I understand why. I came to this understanding by doing a thought experiment. What if it wasn't PepsiCo that paid for a sponsored blog? What if instead it was ESPN's Sport Science? I…
rallain | June 4, 2010I got tired of attacking ESPN Sport Science. Well, tired of attacking might not be the best term. How about, attack in a new way (here are my older Sport Science attacks).
Check out episode 1 of Spoof Science:
A couple of notes:
Watch it youtube if you want the HD version
Making videos takes WAY longer than a blog post
If you hate hearing your own voice, you will really hate hearing your own voice AND seeing yourself while you are editing
rallain | May 31, 2010We went to the aquarium, the kids like it. In the Amazon river section, they have an electric eel. Here is the sign next to the Eel.
Sorry for the poor image quality. I took the picture with my crappy phone and didn't even realize it was bad until later. I used some magic on it to make parts of it readable, but if that was not good enough, here is what it says:
The Electric Eel is the most powerful of all the electric fishes. It can discharge up to 650 volts: six times the power of a household current. A shock can fend off attackers or stun prey so the eel doesn't risk getting hurt in…
rallain | May 6, 2010I already mentioned the MythBusters' crashing two cars episode where they correctly doubled the speed of a pendulum type object. Overall, this was a very visual (although expensive) demo. There was one part that left a sour taste in my mouth - the final explanation from the narrator. First, they showed this.
And then they had an explanation that went something very similar to to this (after restating what the sign above said)
"Although the two-car crash doubles the speed, the energy the crash is transferred to twice the mass resulting in a crash that looks like just one car hitting a wall…
rallain | April 21, 2010I want to give ESPN's Sport Science another chance. The segment on Tim Tebow didn't really have any errors. I thought, cool - what about this one on Jason Pierre-Paul? Here is the clip. Oh wait, embedding is disabled. Ok - if you want to watch go here (the image is a link)
The goal of this segment was to examine why Jason is so awesome at tackling. The answer: because he can do flips. Really, that was the answer. Let me briefly go over some of the problems with this segment.
Correlation does not mean causation
They didn't say it explicitly, but it seems the are saying the reason he…
rallain | April 19, 2010You probably already know how I feel about the "media" and their physics explanations (see attacks). Let me summarize the problem. There are a whole bunch of cool shows on tv that deal with sciency stuff - that is good. These shows then try to teach some science along with their demos and explosions and stuff. This is also good. However, they usually butcher the explanation part. Some of them (ESPN's Sport Science) must just literally make stuff up that sounds cool.
I understand that in common usage, things like "force" can be used lots of different ways. I am ok with that. Also,…
rallain | April 14, 2010I was going through and tagging some old posts. While looking at a post attacking the movie Sunshine, I accidentally found something else on youtube.
Gravity in Sunshine
I could not find a clip online of the scene I want, so I made a cartoon. Basically, (oh - spoiler alert) some guys are trying to get from one spaceship to another by shooting out of the airlock and into the other. They fly through space and into the other airlock, close the door and emergency pump the air in. When the closed air lock fills with air, they all fall down. Since there was no online video version, I made a…
rallain | April 8, 2010In the last episode of MythBusters, they tried to reproduce the following experiment. Suppose you are driving in a car at 60 mph and you shoot a ball backwards at 60 mph (with respect to the car). Will the ball just drop (with respect to the ground)? Actually, it is a cool demo - I saw some Japanese show did this a while ago.
So, what is the problem? The problem is with the MythBusters' use of their terms to explain this thing. Let me look at a couple of the things they said to explain this (surprisingly, they described it several different ways). This first one is my favorite.
Bad…
rallain | October 31, 2009Here is the deal. Why would you put a lot of effort into explaining something wrong? I just don't get it. Wouldn't it be easier and better to just not say anything? The particular show I am ranting about is the 2008 Punkin Chunkin on Discovery (I think). Fairly ok show, but they should have left the science out. The part that made me speak out was when they were talking about the different types of punkin chunkers. They have:
Compressed air
Catapult
Trebuchet
Centrifugal Force Machine
To explain these devices (the physics behind them), the show brought in the big guns. Let's bring in…
rallain | October 11, 2009The other myth the MythBusters looked at last week was the phrase "knock your socks off" (along with the dropping and shooting a bullet myth). But before that, let me complain.
Maybe it is just me, but I totally cringe when these guys use the word 'force'. Force probably isn't the best term to use to describe a collision especially when you are talking about one of the objects. "oh, we will just give this object some more force to impact with that other object". Force is not a property of an object, but rather an interaction between two objects. When two things collide, you really need…
rallain | May 7, 2009Time Warp is this Discovery channel show that makes slow motion videos of stuff. Not too bad of a show (although I already talked about the samurai guy and "waves of energy").
Professor splash is this guy that jumps from really high positions and lands in 1 foot of water (and doesn't die). He was on Time Warp last night. If you are interested in this, I did an explanation of how it works in a previous post.
The Physics of Professor Splash's Jump into 1 foot of water
I haven't watched the whole show yet - but I did TiVo it. If there is any thing interesting to analyze, I will post that…
rallain | May 2, 2009There are a couple of things I should probably not talk about. One of them is photons. But no matter what you think about photons you will probably agree that this is not a very good description of electromagnetic radiation. (from comos4kids.com)
Structure of Energy:All EM energy waves travel at the speed of light when in a vacuum. No matter what their frequency or wavelength, they always move at the same speed. Some properties of waves, such as diffraction and interference, are also seen in EM radiation. Scientists have figured out that there are tiny particles in these waves. The…
rallain | April 24, 2009I have already indirectly talked about this before, but I see it more and more. Say you have a show. It has to be more than entertaining, it has to educational. How do you make things educational? Describe the physics behind the concepts - right? Fine. How do you explain stuff? It's simple. Just make some diagrams with arrows. Be sure to use words like "force", "velocity", "acceleration". You know, physicsy words. Everything will be fine.
Everything will not be fine. First, I love MythBusters. They are awesome. I know they are not scientists, and that is maybe why I like them.…
rallain | March 25, 2009Tom and Jerry, or Fetch! with Ruff Ruffman?
Answer: Tom and Jerry.
What? Yes. The reason: Tom and Jerry has bad physics but does not pretend like it has good physics. I know this is probably going to "type-cast" me as "that guy that keeps attacking Ruff Ruffman." Soon to be followed by "Leave Ruff ALONE!" I am sorry, I can't help it. Here is my problem. If you are going be a show, do whatever you like (I might still make some comments). If you are going to be a show that attempts to teach some stuff, don't you think you should get it correct or at least not reinforce bad ideas?
The…
rallain | March 17, 2009Dear Ruff Ruffman,
My kids really like your show. However, there is a problem. You promote it like it is science, but the content keeps having mistakes in it. Previously, I pointed out your mistake about in infrared thermometer (if can't remember, you said the thermometer measures the temperature with a laser. In fact, the laser is just used to aim.)
So, you see, I don't just like to randomly attack people. The problem is that you are saying "hey look at science" but your science is wrong. I suggest you either a) stop pretending to be a science show or b) get a science advisor (I am…